On Character Recognition, Optical and Otherwise…

It must have been about six months ago now that a friend of mine named Jay called me one morning and asked me to do him a favor and take a look at an "Acrobat" file. For those among you less than moderately geeky, you call a file an Acrobat file when it was saved or created in a special file format called PDF. PDF in the acronym in common use for Portable Document Format files. The format was created some twenty years ago at a company called Adobe. Back then Adobe was in the Font and Imaging language business, not the Photoshop business. The name of that language is PostScript, and it was the original science behind the fonts that you see today. Science has grown, as have language options in the world of graphic arts, but while they were building the company, they faced two major technical problems. One was with color, and the other with file formats in which to store color, fonts, and other graphic information. Both challenges could only be met by some common "color model" and some common "file format". The problem(s) were called "x-y". There were going to be x number of printers outputting y different color models to z number of output devices, or x number of computers whose now-digitally-enabled creative people could see color on x number of monitors. Or y numbers of different programs could save in x number of different formats. What was needed were color spaces that were agreed upon by all the manufacturers. Ditto file formats. So were born from first etches on stone to hand painted colors to four simulation colors (CMYK), Adobe RGB, LAB, and for files PDF.

 

 

Color space is still something that can and does take several different forms. Not so with Acrobat; everybody agrees there is no better way to put fonts, layouts, images, and now video and any rich content into one easy-to-generate (as part of the "Print" workflow in all three major operating systems) package. And when the package moves from the creative workflow - the one that is happening in every ad agency, every newspaper, and every magazine in the civilized universe - to the place where things are transformed from that package onto the printing plates ( for printing ) or servers ( for Internet distribution and publishing) - it moves just as easily as it can be output by the artist from her original vision. PDF makes things easy in the creative world. I am not voicing opinion; Acrobat is a reality, and PDF as a way to move files around is the standard.

PDF files can hold a lot of different things and then send that content effectively to any medium, be it print, web, or crop circles. One of the things they can contain are fonts. The next, pictures. Pictures come in two flavors. The first is a "Vector". Vectors are basically line drawings that are mathematically defined, and can be output tiny or huge without any degradation of the image's quality. The second kind of image is called a "Bitmap". A bitmap is how 99% of all the digital photographs you ever see are saved. They might be put into an Acrobat file to move from one place to another. It is not necessary to save an image as an Acrobat file, though, since images like photographs do not contain actual type. In other words, the sign you see in that picture from mom is a picture. You cannot put some tool inside the sign, highlight the text, and type new replacement text to take its place like you could in a word processor. Let's think about that for a moment. If you are skilled, you can retouch the picture and remove the sign, replacing it with other bushes in the background using a clone tool and make it appear to disappear, but you cannot change the phone number on the sign without a great deal of experience retouching. That is a painting job. Like changing Mona's smile on DeCapirio's painting (just kidding; I know Michelle's ancestor actually painted it but had the credit stolen by a white dude. Figures.).
If you take a photograph of something, there is no editable type contained in the document. A normal scan - what should have been done to show the American public something they could analyze without seeing layers, characters, or other "artifacts" - is just that. A photograph.
You can, under certain and very specialized workflows, make that happen. You could use software that could recognize the type on a form, for example. It is called Character Recognition Software, and is used to save the time it would take to retype, let's say, the documentation underneath ObamaCare. If somebody gave you the wheelbarrow of paper it would take to read it, and you did not have a digital version of the file, like a Microsoft Word file, and had to create one, what would you do?

You would use Character Recognition Software. You would not retype it.

Now, back to the real story. The real story is about a story publisher Gary Anderson and I posted here on ThePoliticalSandbox when my friend had called me that night. The story was about the PDF my Rabbi friend had asked me to look at. The Acrobat file he asked to check out was the recently (the day before) released "Long Form". It was a scanned version of a birth certificate. The birth certificate for a child named Barack Hussein Obama.
I had heard the whole "birther" theory. I filed it in my "Bush brought down the towers" cabinet. The cabinet has stuff in it like the folder about encounters with the almond people. They (those weird little aliens that push their fingers in your ear and leave stuff there) are not as amusing or laughable as the tower folder. I have been on the roof of a building above a small town square in a town called Palmyra many years ago. Above a hundred people - a mix of dads, moms, and their rambunctious children - who had, as was normal on cool winter evenings in the Cauca Valley in southern Colombia -- been standing around in the park below. I was watching them when one-by-one, then in pods, and then all together looking north behind me. Looking at a craft no less than 300' long and 200' wide and fifty thick. The blue rectangular lights moving in circles around the rim were not neon; they were something I had never see before or since. It made no noise as it moved south above and then beyond that little town square in that little farming town. When ten miles south it turned, moving into the Andes to the west at speeds that should have made sound as it pulled the air with it. We all felt it. The young hippy named Gary and the old men around him drinking aguardienti felt it. The children were quiet; so were the birds. When breath came back it came back collectively, and came back as an "ohhhhh".
So I ain't so sure about the almond people in the Almond People folder. Somebody or something was driving that thing. And I can tell you it was no man-made Pentagon secret waiting to turn into a popular consumer product. Not that thing. Not that silence and not those blue lights. So almond people I might buy into. After all, we went from tubes to the Internet pretty quick. Maybe the almond people dropped something out of that football field they were flying in the valley that night.

 

 

Not so the tower thing. I spent a good amount of time going in and out of all the tower buildings. I didn't work in them, but I was around the printing industry, and I was around wall street people. So I was at the towers a few times. I met people there for breakfast, I met people there for sales calls, and I met a lawyer there when somebody was shooting me out of a company I helped put together. When I saw the buildings come down, and later heard that the small building was clearly the result of Cheney personally carrying some eighteen thousand pounds of plastique explosives to hide underneath the air conditioners, so they could hide their duplicity in the growth of Halliburton and the sales of weapons to the cartels. (oh yeah, not the cartels, freedom fighters. I have the wrong gun-deals mixed together). And if you take the time to read that Cheney didn't need so much explosives after all; the building was structurally flawed so badly according to architects that there might have been somebody "paid off to sign off" the original plans for the building. But since corruption is so rare in big city, union-based contracting, that that is very, very unlikely. Right? Truth is the Towers were taken down by religious fanatics taught to destroy our nation and all ideas of religious freedom since the time they were children, sort-of like six year old Palestinian children I see waving AKs around on the evening news. I wonder if my progressive friends know of any progressive and justice-providing program out there that helps children who have been taught that Jews are rodents? No? Well there is a victim for you. Of course somebody already bought the Palestinians as Oppressed Victims franchise early in the game. Ayres and his socialist wife, of course, among them. And code pink.

You already think that kid with the AK is the victim, right? The victim of those Jews. Or should I say THE Jew? Calling them "The" makes is so much easier to hate them. You learn not to name farm animals. You call them "cow". Name them and they take on a personality. It might have been there, of course, but tagging them with names turns them into sentient beings. And you don't want to do that, now, do you? I fish. If you fish tournaments, you see the Pita-girls hanging around after the event. Progressives need victims, and the Tea Party wants economic Darwinism. The fit will take care of the truly needy, trust me.

Character recognition by any other name...

When I looked at that PDF file that day, I opened it in a program called Adobe Illustrator. I opened it, looked at an interface component that is called the "Layers" panel, and saw something that I should not have seen. I saw layers in a document that should not have had any. What I saw lead me first to say it was a forgery, and then, when I realized that all I saw was very unusual characteristics, and nothing more, I retracted what I said and apologized. Then I restated my position. The one I still maintain.

The layers in that long form birth certificate would only be created if the scan of the original was done outside normal methods. Under normal circumstances, that birth certificate would be a "flat" scan. Like a picture of your mom's birthday cake, or a copy of a deed you had to show somebody before they would trust that the fence you wanted to rip out was yours to rip out - it would normally just be put on the glass, the SCAN button pressed, and the resultant document would not contain any type you could select and edit. It would not contain layers...


You would only use character recognition software - again, under normal, everyday "workflows" - if you wanted to save yourself from having to do too much typing. If you had any experience scanning both type-intensive documents as well as images that required close-up investigation or clarification, you would never use an OCR option to scan that birth certificate. Never. And that process in the workflow - that character recognition event - is the only rational thing that could have happened to create multiple layers in the document given to the public by the white house. Anybody with experience, or that wanted to ensure that it was without question an original would have simply scanned it, and scanned it at a relatively high-resolution. Let's say 1,200 or even 2,400 dots-per-inch.

If I was to testify in court that that thing was real, I would need a new scan. So would anybody. And to keep things above board, I would want five. The two done just before his and the two done immediately after. Same place in Hawaii. All done as flat scans and all done at 2,400 dpi. No OCR.

Who cares where the guy was born? Really? Who cares?

When I saw the layers and first put my commentary up here on the political sandbox, the blog went ballistic. And so, too, did the idea that there were things wrong - or at the very least questionable -- with the PDF file we were seeing. As you can imagine, I got accused of being a birther. I am not. I do not care where Obama was born, neither should any of our readers, quite frankly. His mom was an American. I do not care if he was born while she was visiting the lizard creatures controlling the land of Pellucidar. He is an American and he is the President. The media wanted him, and the media got him. Hiding anything they might have heard about him, they put him in office an unknown. Now? He might have been born in Kenya. Wow!!!! Who would have known?!

Who cares? What I do know, and what America should know clearly, is that the man was raised in Indonesia by a woman married to a hard-core radical socialist/Marxist. In his words and the words of his son, he believed in the complete and total redistribution of all resources, and that all nations should be managed by the college professors who live there. Management should be completely centralized and complete in all its invasions into personal freedoms. Read the Dreams from his father if you doubt what I am saying. The book I mean, not the dreams. I know where the dreams lead. They start out in rose gardens and end in horror. Nightmares always start out in beautiful gardens in the world of progressives. By the time hell arrives, they are out of office and out of the way of the shit. Take a look at any attempt at any time in any civilization and in any form. The only fairness is fairness. Social Darwinism, while terrible in the eyes of our president, brings charity. It brings beauty, and it puts heart valves in the chests of little girls who need them.

Yesterday America got to see what was said in a publisher's brochure pitching their brilliant new books and the brilliant authors who wrote them. The authors in the brochure were both new and not so new to the jaded distributors and publisher's reps whose eyes the brochure was designed for. And AP identified Barack as a Kenyan when he first won his senate seat.

http://web.archive.org/web/20040627142700/eastandard.net/headlines/news26060403.htm


In Kenya, Obama said “It’s nice to be home.” and AP said that the new Illinois Senator was Kenya-born and Hawaii-raised. Why in Hell did the two lawyers you see in this picture wearing the obligatory Almond-Man jewelry you get when you become the President miss the fact that a number of different places made the same mistake of saying he was born in Africa? What, did his future aspirations have him putting recipes into the “Black and White” cookbook someday, like fellow-democrat and fellow liar the Pow-Wow-Chow-Down babe running against a republican in Massachusetts?
Many people have done a brochure, or a flier, or even paid to have a campaign done for their company, where branding and "message" is closely fine-tuned, until you are happy with the message being told by the professional you are paying for to the market you need to reach. If you have, you know how carefully editors look at copy. How they go over every single character with a magnifying glass. They have on their desks three or four different reference books, to make sure that 'then' is never used when you should have used "than". Messaging is important. In the world of professional publishers, the more anal somebody is, the better they are at their job. People do not identify your birthplace as an African nation when it was, in fact, one of the most beautiful beaches, and quite American. And every author in that brochure had to approve what was said about them. And in a brochure done by a publisher to be seen by creative people and other people in the same industry? There is going to be three times more people checking every dot on every "I" than would be under even normally anal editorial workflows.

So what does this mean? Does this prove that the twin towers were, in fact, the result of the almond men talking to W. about going short on Haliburton 90s? No. It is not proof that Barack was born in a grass hut with drum cycles in the distance, while some guy with a tiger bone stuck through his nose chanted booga-wooga. What it does prove is that character recognition is something easily invented by politicians. I think progressives tend to do it more then tea party people do, but the tea party has not been around so long after all. You want to be the first colored babe on campus? Make it up. Say that your paw-paw-paw, according to your maw-maw-maw "had high cheekbones" and that since being somebody you are not - especially somebody your ideological partners have identified as an official "VICTIM CLASS" - will get you into the best parties, what is a little red lie between friends? And what is wrong with lying about being born in Kenya if that makes you even more African than the African-American brother standing next to you.

Or more accurately in the case of Barack, behind him. If you don't know by now that this guy is always the smartest guy in the room, that his intelligence is beyond understanding by mere mortals, you have not listened to the news. Except we cannot see his college records. Who needs records when you have heard this guy read from a TelePrompTer??! I mean what more proof does one need?

Barack wanted into the good parties. He was light black (sort of like being a "white" Hispanic, right?) guy, good looking, and if he said he was African, think of how much more he would get laid, or how much more good dope he would get to smoke for free, or how may high-end political machines would see him as a great Victim-identifier and Victim-collector.

And who can blame Elizabeth Warren for just lying about being a member of a victim's group? Ask yourselves this question: if she didn't lie about her heritage, how in heaven's name would she have been allowed to contribute family recipes to "Chow-Down at the Pow-Wow"; a cookbook of Native American (and of course sustainable) dishes? As a plain-Jane-white-babe, she had no victim creds. No creds, no cookbook.

One last thing before I shut up for a few more days. When Gary Anderson and me first broke this story - because as far as we know we were the first ones on the web to question that long form given to me that day by Rabbi Jay - I felt something that I do not normally feel. It was unusual.

It was fear. The fear is gone, draining away with the threads that appeared all over the web those days. All gone quickly after they started. I had said the long form had stuff wrong with it, somebody hired another expert to challenge what I had said - to explain that of course wherever office in Hawaii had that long form was used to routinely processing text-intensive documents. Documents that were put through the specialized process of character recognition. The person that did the scan probably does nothing but process hundreds of pages of text that needs to be turned into word processing files. I am sure that happens. Sure it does... So when asked to scan the president's birth certificate, no red flags were raised in that government employee's mind. Of course not. Nothing special here, folks.

So they took the birth certificate out of the regular, unguarded file cabinet, put it on the scanner, and said to themselves "Jeez! Look at this!!! There are at least thirty words on this document, and who knows what people want to do with this scan. I better make sure i turn on character recognition software, so we don't have to spend the eighteen weeks it would take a government employee to type that much text.

The results? A certificate that could not possibly be used in court to prove anything. Not if one party had a lawyer, and the Rule of Law was at play. That document has different typefaces on it. It should not. It shows a watermark security pattern. The pattern is somehow on the form itself, and surrounding the form as well. If you look at your scanner, the inside of the cover is white. That is so nothing besides the document you put on the scanner is scanned. The long form I saw that night had the same pattern on the paper and on the cover of the scanner on which that document was placed before the scan button was pressed. The edges are different. It was aligned very, very carefully. But not perfectly. The dual patterns alone - one on the paper and one somehow on the inside of that scanner's cover - should have raised more red flags than a runaway freight train. They didn't. I had no coin in that
document game. My battle is the voting booth, and I can only affect one thing in this world, and that is my choice of actions. Now and only now. If the world felt that way to an individual, and taught the same to their children, progressives would have that utopia they dream of forcefully regulating onto an unwilling following.

There are a few things I would love to see. First and foremost five pictures of five birth certificates. Five scans. Two before and two after the president's. All done flat and all done at 2,400 dpi RGB.

The last thing is an answer to a question that will never be answered, at least not during our lifetimes:

Why release that PDF file with those layers on it? There can only be a few possible reasons. They are the same sort of answers that are gong to be provided when the press asks - as we hope they will - why Barack didn't challenge AP's saying he was born in Kenya. Why he didn't challenge the biography in that publisher's brochure?

The reasons for the PDF file?

1. Somebody wanted to get the news out that Obama was, in fact, born in Kenya. But now that the AP story is out, and that brochure from the publisher is public, the story isn't about the birth certificate anymore. It is about Barack. Why in hell didn't he personally challenge the biography? Or the AP story about his being elected to the senate? You would think that if you actually ran for the senate and won the contest after your campaign's private investigator found out your opponent frequented a popular Chicago brothel, you would save - or at very least read - all and every article you could find with your name in it, espousing your glorious victory. I sure would, wouldn't you? Why in heaven's name didn't Barack challenge those stories?
2. Somebody wanted to attract anybody who might possibly notice any of the dozen problems the long form PDF files contained (since then the PDF on the White House site has itself been Flattened, or had the Layers removed). And man, have they done that.

Guys like me immediately were branded and vilified. I saw that coming the first day I said anything. I had started to answer questions on Beck's Blaze about the file, and it took all of three hours before that came to an end. Glenn is a real hero to me, and has taken his considerable communication skills and dedicated them to saving this nation. For that we will all be indented to him. But again, I wasn't doing anything but asking why that file had layers. Why that file had patterns that should not have been where they were? Why did that file show different characters, so bit mapped and some (now) actual editable type? Why was OCR software used? Why can't we get another scan? A normally-generated scan, done specifically to avoid these jettisons? Why not? What would be wrong with looking at another scan, and scans of surrounding documents? Anything?

Now that the issue of his Kenyan origin have again arisen, it is time to ask the truth. Time to pull the switch and turn on the lights. It is not about one thing anymore. It is about the truth.

Just who are you, Barack Hussein Obama? And Who's Yo Daddy? We do not want his dreams, Barack. The people in closed rooms at the United Nations want the dreams of your daddy, Barack. But not us.

Written as stand-in editor of the Sandbox. Come back to me, oh friend; come back to us.
Vote Tea in 2012. And take the money out of politics. Stop charitable donations and impose a flat and fair tax. Because lies, birth certificates, victims and oppressors aside, those changes are the true path to freedom.

Science vs Gut Feelings

I run a web site called TheOnlineFisherman.com. Fishing politics is a big deal to me, and if you want to know more about it, feel free to visit the site at your earliest convenience. If you like what we write here on ThePoliticalSandbox, you can help us a lot by “Liking” the site. It’s a commercial venture, and at the rate the environmentalists in this nation and the world are shutting fishing down, we don’t have all that much time to keep it running. You might not know this, but sport fishing the way we love it – Catch and Release for the most part, with table fare taken as desired and only taken for that night’s meals – is now illegal in two countries in Europe (Germany and Sweden, bless their well-machined souls). We do not freeze fish, nor gift it to our neighbors. No serious angler does. We’re environmentalists. If we do not protect the waters, who will?
Environmentalists, That’s who. In an effort to protect those poor fish from plebian medieval thinkers like us, they got their slimy hands into the writing of the nation’s only fishery management law – one called the Magnusson/Stevens Fishery Management Act. We’re fighting hard to rewrite it, and are getting close, with major success of late, since the Tea Party began running the house. But that’s not what this story is about.
This story is about a lump of coal, barometric pressure, and a heart valve in the chest of a little girl I’ve never had the blessing to meet. I thought you might like how it came about.
We have a section on our web site called “Ask the Captain”. On that site component, my partner, retired cop turned Make-a-Wish spokesman and complete her of mine answers a few of the many dozens of questions he gets every day from our thousands and thousands of readers (you really should check it out, and again, Like it for us). In that section last week, David answered a question about barometric pressure, and whether or not it effects the behavior of the sports fish we target. Our lives are about fishing, so questions like that – and specifically questions about barometric pressure – are common.
He answers it the way I or any (most) anglers would. “Yup! It sure does, Mr. Jones. In fact, if the barometer is falling, fish tend to eat more.” He found a very cool graphic somewhere on the web, and without asking permission of whoever drew it in the first place, put it into the story. That’s a no-no. Commonly done on the web, using stuff without specific permissions is not cool. I am a creative. I hate it when people use my stuff and do not stroke my ego. Damn it. My ego is what it is all about, right?
So we get “the” letter. It says that “I appreciate your using my artwork, but if you don’t mind, could you give me credit for it.?” The letter was from a doctor David Ross. Doctor Ross turned out to be a serious angler, and I am getting to meet him. It was Doctor Ross’s comment to my partner David that he had “Proven that barometric pressure has no effect on fish. Not if the water is deeper than a ‘few inches’”
I’m sorry. The doctor might have the best experience fishing for salmon (and stripers and whatever swims, the guy IS a serious angler, which amazes me even more), but I believe, and I think mostly anybody that fishes believes, that whatever scientific evidence the doctor might have collected and written about (he made sure I knew he’s written many books. Like two I think. And a lot of articles). I am not busting this guy, but I am sorry, Doctor. But you haven’t proven shit to me. I fish, you fish, and you count stuff. You are surely convinced that your intelligent, scientific, academic mind, heaped as it is in the lore and lure of sportfishing, has proven something to the world, but you aint. Not to me you ain’t. Fish eat more if the barometer is falling. End of story.
So I am putting a poll up on the web site in the next day or so. It asks anglers if they think – or know in their guts – that fish do bite more if the pressure is falling. I know what the poll is going to say.
I also know that recently I read a book by a guy that “proved” that there is no God. There is no heaven, there is no afterlife, and although it makes the archaic and shallow-minded feel better, that’s all it is: fake emotions and belief systems meant to make the stupid (not college educated and really best-of-all employed on tenure where you cannot get fired no matter how obnixious or anti-American your “thoughts” might be) feel good about a confusing (to them, not to the author, of course) universe. They look up at that night sky and laugh at the fact the somebody like me doesn’t see neutrons. He sees magic. He sees God.
This is an email I was gonna send to the Doctor in response. A letter about the barometer. But like often happens, my thoughts strayed. And they went to a little girl I have not met yet. A little girl with a heart valve.
I hope you enjoy reading the mail. I didn’t send it to him. I thought it better placed here.
 
I am doing a poll. Whether people who fish a lot believe what you very well might have proven a myth.
I anticipate 90% of the people that respond -- and we will have 1,000 at least -- will believe that without question barometric change makes fish eat. Specifically drops in pressure. I sure believe it. And like you I've been on the water all my life. 54 of 59 years, anyway.
This is fascinating. For a couple of reasons.
I am sure you got my message from last night -- about fishing politics and my experience with Drs Pauly and Worm. Doctor Worm and Pauly, as you probably know, wrote a white paper about the same time as Mann published the Hockey Stick Global warming chart for all the world to determine was the end-all in climate change. The publishing of the Pauly/Worm paper was very closely related to the publishing of the Mann materials. And got the same kind of fear-based, Al-Gore-prompted panic.Coincidence?
I am not a scientist. It's warmer this year than I remember in the years I've lived on the Bay. Two years ago mostly all our snook died from a 40-day run of the coldest weather ever. Is the climate changing? In my short life, arguably yes. But like many people, I believe in science until it becomes apparent that it is being used -- by people playing both sides of any political argument based on said numerics -- to move around vast amounts of money.
Unfortunately for the scientific community, and this is scary but definitely true -- the panic-politics of Al Gore, and many, many other fear-communicators -- they have been attached to shear madness. I am a person that believes that Al Gore saw the money on the wall, and ran with hit. His passion is not based on a willingness to consider climactic change over a million years. It's just not. And at this point it is hard to listen to what might very well be solid evidence that every man, woman, and child on the earth reverting to seventh-century utopian agricultural lifestyle, sans iPads and sans Heart Valves made from coal products will somehow save our planet from some planet-poisoning short-term event. I, like many other rational people, weigh global activity, not American and western cultural activity in a glass bubble. We live in a global world. Us throwing away our iPads is not gonna slow down the Indians (you been there, Professor? You should go if not; China, too. There are more smart people without shoes in both countries than we have people. Smart people with degrees as thick as yours or any academic I know).
So meeting a guy like Ray Hilborn from the University of Washington, or meeting you, is quite refreshing. Perhaps through relatively intelligent conversations, we can learn to agree that man is, indeed, having some impact on the world, and can always improve his stewardship.
But we might also agree that that oil industry - the one vilified daily by a rabid media hungry to diminish the power of free markets -- the power of "darwinian economics" -- gives us coal.
Do you remember that superman episode, doctor, where the Man of Steel found himself -- in his guise as Clark Kent, Mild Mannered Reporter for a Great Metropolitan Newsletter -- near an idol in some remote jungle? He was with his girlfriend and Jimmy, his trusted companion. Somebody had stolen the eye of the tribe's idol. It was a palm-sized diamond. The tribe was pissed off, as you can well imagine. Not able to just squeeze the juice out of the tribal chief, who was very close to stabbing trusted companion Jimmy in the heart with his stone-age spear without showing his true nature as the Man of Steel, son of the dead planet come to earth as a super-hero, Clark Kent saw a piece of coal on the ground. Aha!!! said he (you could see his thoughts in a bubble in the upper right corner). He was thinking squeeeeeze.
So he takes the coal, hides it in his palm, and sticks his hand into the mud underneath the statue of the (now) one-eyed idol. Under the mud, and under the cover of his mild-mannered alter ego, he squeezed that coal till it turned into a diamond. About 27 minutes into the episode, The most Super of Dudes put the now-transformed piece of coal into the hole where the thieves had purloined the original stone, and all was well. He was, as he often was, the hero to Lois Lane and Jimmy. Hurrah.
As you know, the purest and most valuable of all diamonds is simply that: a piece of coal squeezed by the super powers of Mother Earth. In my archaic mind, Doctor, by the tight hands of a brilliant, unknown, and Divine intelligence. In the Bahgavad Gita -- the "Hindi Bible" of sorts -- there is a scene where God (who is actually the key player's own consciousness unleashed to its full glory and power) is talking to the character "Arjuna" about what "he" is. What "God" is. He says "it is you, Arjuna. You are the mountains, you are the sun, and you are the oceans."
He closes by saying "The man who knows the difference between a diamond and a lump of dog shit knows not what either one is made of."
Somewhere, Doctor, there is a child. A three-year old. A little girl. I have met her, and do not know her face. But as sure as I type this message, Doctor, I know that she exists. In her chest is a heart valve. A heart valve made of plastic. Made by a man or woman whose collective intelligence reaches back to that battlefield that day. That battlefield named Kurukshetra. And just like superman, he squeezed a lump of coal to make that diamond in that little girl's chest.
Would environmentalism shut down that coal mine, Doctor? No. It would not. Not true environmentalism spawned by a love for all things. But a love that comes, first of all, for that little girl with the diamond in her chest. 
So science used by a global movement that fundamentally hates that lump of coal is something I push back from, Doctor. That lump of coal is that heart valve. And the idiots that think otherwise should only have that baby girl of which I think as their life's stewardship assignment. Because such assignments come from somewhere, Doctor. And they catch the most unsuspecting of us by surprise.
God Bless America, Doctor David. It's going to be a good thing to have you to talk to.
 
TO MY READERS!!! I am no replacement for Gary Anderson on this Sandbox, but it’s fun to play here. Gary is resting at Home in Northport, and would love your comments. You can email him at inshoreflorida@gmail.com and he will try to respond to your mails. He knows he’s in your prayers.

COMING SOON: ANGLERS4MITT.COM!!!!

AND JOIN THE FREAKEN Recreational Fishing Alliance!!!! WE NEED YOU, YOUR MONEY, AND MOST IMPORTANTLY YOUR VOTES IN NOVEMBER

VOTE TEA AND BE FREE

No Red States, No Blue States. Not This Time, Mr. President…

I grew up in a Union household. Local #28, Sheetmetal workers and roofers. Entering the business at the ripe old age of sixteen during the summer months, I got my card by the time I was 18, and the first year out of high school I hit the ladders. This was in New Jersey in late sixties, fortunately (or so I thought at the time) I lived through it all. Union man all the way, I remember seeing this guy who used to come to the job sites all the time. He had a Cadillac, I remember. My uncle Eddie – the guy who got me into the Union in the first place – drove a station wagon. That doesn’t mean much, except for the fact that the guy in the Cadillac – the guy who represented me with the big companies that wanted me to work for free and would but for his protection and the protection of scary thick guys – always wore really nice clothes. My uncle never wore nice clothes but for the nights he used to go visit his girlfriend. Then he dressed in expensive clothes. Not at work, though. Roofing was dirty stuff. Hot, dirty, and dangerous. I have the scars to prove it.

There are other things I remember from back then. Those union days in the sixties and early 1970’s in New Jersey.

There were no black guys in the union. That’s something I remember. I had black friends. I had grown up in public housing, you see. I don’t know exactly what that meant, because by the time I was maybe seven we had moved into a house my aunt Florence and Uncle Eddie had rented. They were proud of that house. Proud of being out of housing. Proud. I remember how very proud my Uncle Eddie was. Of himself, of me, and of this country. He was a pure union guy, Uncle Eddie, and democrat until the day he died.

Black guys who roofed were what were called “Scabs”. You could be a black “scab” or a white scab, mind you. Working on a roof, and tossing that mop with that molten tar on it – tar that could literally take the skin off down to the white bone if it hit you hot – without a union card made you the equivalent of a healing open sore. A scab. Again, there were scabs of all colors. All you had to do was roof without a union card to be called and defined as a scab. But black guys could work only on scab crews.

Now I attend meetings called “9/12” meetings. I get their newsletters, and I think of myself as a member of a poorly-defined but to-me-at-least very, very real and very meaningful political party of sorts called The Tea Party.

Guess what? I’m on a scab crew all of a sudden. And love it. I talked to a good friend of mine today. A guy I have a lot of respect for for a lot of good reasons. He said something about the tea party and I asked him if he had ever been to a meeting. “No”.

He might as well have been one of those old guys I remember driving around with on my way to a union job site. Passing by a crew of beautiful black men, shining in the sun, sweating while they tossed those mops, he said “look at the [n]rs. F-ing scabs”

Thank God I am awake now. Thank God I know the truth. Those unions weren’t protecting anybody but that guy in that Cadillac. I have seen a “War on Poverty” play out in my life. I have seen a “War on Drugs” play out in my life. Failures. I see Solyndra. I am accused of a “war on women” and a “war on gays” and a “War on the working class” and a “war on anything counter to the words and thoughts of loser and money-sucker Karl Marx”.

Get over it. The scabs are taking over. Gays, get over it. Don’t let a word tear this beautiful nation further apart. Black people, get over it. Nobody hates you or oppresses you for being black. To the contrary. A lot of people will throw free money at you just because you are. Women, get over it. You are not treated unfairly.

Mr President, Get over it. Most of all, get over yourself. We know you grew up in Indonesia for the most part, and raised by Marxists. You told us yourself in your book that you were “attracted to the marxists”. We know Mr. President.

You were too little, too early. Perhaps Marxist thought – the nanny state, unions-are-good and all-else bad thought will someday rule the roost, so to speak.

But not tonight. And certainly not in November. We’re over you, Mr. President. We are over progressive, politically-correct, smarter-than-thou arrogant thought. It is destroying not only America, but threatens civilization itself. Go back to college. They need you there..

“Fairness” plays better than the “S” word…

I spend a lot of time talking to other people, obviously. I’m so good at talking that the people that are close to me know to just put the phone down, put it on speaker, and let me talk to myself. As a professional writer for the past 30 years-or-so, talking to oneself is, I know, a job requirement. Now I write (mostly) fishing articles. For most of my life I wrote how-to books about (primarily) Adobe software. Now I write about catching tarpon. How-to is how-to, after all. Whether you’re writing about prison security systems (which I’ve done) or how to use Adobe Illustrator’s new blended path tool (ditto) writing is writing. You tell people what you’re going to tell them, you tell it to them, and then you tell them what you just told them. If you’re writing courseware, the finishing touch is asking them questions, to test to see if they read all that nonsense in the first place, and can either (respectively) open the doors to the C-Block or paint the perfect motorcycle.

Something I do not write about very much – except for here on ThePoliticalSandbox – is politics. Oh, I talk about politics all right. I’ll talk to anybody about politics. But the people I love talking to the most about politics are my progressive friends. And yeah, I do have a few. One in particular is a guy named Jay. Jay’s a progressive tried and true. A New York rabbi, his congregation voted for President Obama by a factor of 100% to 0%. They’re compassionate, after all. They care about people. And like every progressive I’ve ever known, listened to, or read the work of, it’s the caring that counts. The results of their compassion notwithstanding, they’re compassionate, and prove it by voting for whoever is saying that they “care for the peeeeeeple” or “Care for the chillllldren” or “care for the poooooooor” or “demand fairrrrrrness”. The extra letters, like the passion in their voices when on MSNBC, Fox, or the Cooking Channel, helps. It adds flavor to the conversation. Failure doesn’t matter. Progressives are able to easily ignore the utter failure of every word, every idea, and every intention that slips through their practiced tongues.

In the fall, we’re going to have a chance to do something that progressives don’t find important. And that’s put our actions where our mouths are. For the first time since the 1860’s, when the choice was open market on human beings called Negros and a country where the color of a man’s skin wasn’t as important as the actions one took on the streets, in church on Sundays, or in the bar on Friday night. Truth is truth. Being nice is being nice. Real men do not brag. They thank God for the good He blesses them and whoever they might have helped as a result of their actions, and they move on. They don’t fly to the site of the event, camera crews trailing closely, to make a photo-op of every good thing they think they did, or they can make other people think they did.

The Elections of 1860 offered the American public the difference between this America and one where men were judged by their actions and kindness, and not the color of their skin. The elections of 2012 will make another offer to Americans: slave to an all-caring and clearly smarter-than-you Federal Government or on your own in a free America. I will take counting on myself and the ones I love that surround me. I personally do not trust Barack Hussein Obama any further one of those $1,200 desks they threw in the dumpster when Solyndra hit the dead end of the “Green Movement”.

Every day I hear the President tell us how much he cares for the working man. Have you ever compared his almost mind-numbing rhetoric to the same crap being sold to America by a peanut farmer named Jimmy? I hear Vice President Biden tell me how republicans (“They”) would burn forests, pollute the air, ignore a climate shift that must be caused by mankind because flawed “scientific” data proves it is (the same science that recently finally proved that God was a figment of my imagination!!!!). I hear any and every progressive say the same thing. A collective Debbie Wasserman Schultz (did you see see straightened her hair for a week?) saying that I’m a large penis with no brain that just turned out lucky enough to have feet to move me around with my bloated republican head stuck on top.

It’s time. It’s time to act. Like those long ago elections, this one counts. Counts more than Gore winning. Counts more than the two terms of Clinton, the two terms of Busch, and the terms of every president that ever came before Obama. Since becoming president, our Socialist in Chief as spent more money then all previous presidents combined. And he is on his way to breaking his own record.

Ever wonder why his first executive order was to seal any and all college records? He was schooled under funding as a foreign exchange student and not under the name Obama, but that’s easy enough to assign to yourself as a homework project. Obama came into the position feeling that it was his job – divinely or globally (and secularly) inspired – to fix the wrongs imposed on the world by this country. I don’t think we’ve harmed much of anything, but we sure as shit fixed our share of broken stuff.

Just ask Germany. Or Great Britain. Or anywhere free. And let’s not let go of it. France just went socialist. How do you think that’s gonna work out for them? You think it’s about to get business friendly in Paris?

Coming soon to the French Restaurant of your choice: socialism in all its well-meaning and freedom-destroying glory (?). What do you really think it means when the word “Fairness” slips from the tongue of our Fibber-in-Chief? His co-conspirators? The Union chiefs of the world? The UN’s inner circles? Capitalism and the western way of life, in their opinion and according to well documented statements – has run its course. It’s time for change, right? It’s time for change, all right. It’s time to change back to the people that brought you Ronald Regan.You want transparency, lose this guy.

Guess Again. We can now watch socialism play its role on the cream sauce capital of the world. Let’s just hope it’s cream they’re going to be able to swallow as a people. Let’s not taste it anymore than it’s been shoved down our throats by the POTUS and his ilk. There’s a reason he was at the Reverend Wright’s church all those years. He is the Reverend Wright with a teleprompter making sure his true ideology doesn’t slip from his slick but oh-so-forked tongue.

We have a president in the oval office who has said “The Constitution is a negative document. It tells us what the government can’t do. It fails to define what the government should do for the people [italics ours].”

What does that really mean? Who the hell is this guy? And if you think that’s a little too vague, or inspired by the tin-foil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist trapped in this old and dusty body, ask yourself this one.

Who the hell does this guy think he is?

 

 

Technorati Tags: freedom,socialism,obama,fair,fairness,UN,elections,2012

Federal Registry for Anglers?

This is going to be a short conversation. We would like you to do a little research on a move by the Federal Government to register all recreational anglers. Might we ask why the hell the feds want to know who's fishing, where they're fishing, what they're fishing for, and where they live? Next they're going to ask us -- or demand from us -- obedience in all things.

Oh yeah. I almost forgot. Reefs filled with American Red Snapper, hordes of Gag grouper being released back to the ocean, what kind of light bulbs we're allowed to have, what kind of paint we're allowed to use in our homes, and where and what we can read.

Do your research and when you get the letter from the government telling you about their wonderful program to track your every move? Send it back to them. And watch for some serious upgrades and new stuff from my friend Gary Anderson as he recovers from some serious health problems. But Gary's Gary, and his strength and God's help will bring him through these difficult times. Until you see him (soon), keep him in your prayers...